Pressing Concerns: Royal Ottawa, Lonesome Joan, Cosmo Jimmy, Still Submarine

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New Monday, new Pressing Concerns! This is sort of an odds-and-ends one, which are always sneakily my favorite ones to do: new albums from Royal Ottawa and Lonesome Joan, a previously-unreleased new-old album from Cosmo Jimmy, and an EP from Still Submarine are what you can expect below.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Royal Ottawa – Carcosa

Release date: October 17th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: College rock, folk rock, psychedelic rock, Paisley Underground
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Ontario Baby

Recently I was introduced to the music of Royal Ottawa, an elusive Canadian band whose members have been sporadically releasing and playing music since the 1980s. Their origins lie in the early punk/post-punk band Bugs Harvey Oswald, who spawned in Ireland, played shows with The Fall, Mission of Burma, and the Ramones, and who disappeared in the mid-80s having only ever released one single. According to Wally Salem of The Beautiful Music, the Royal Ottawa arose in the 90s and put out a CD in 1996, although there’s no record of this on the Internet that I could find. After another period of inactivity (in the public eye, at least), Royal Ottawa entered the modern world with 2015’s The World We Know, and this time they took under a decade to return, materializing again this year with a double album called Carcosa. 

For a band that’s existed under the radar for so long, Royal Ottawa are pretty good at selling themselves–their website describes Carcosa as “sand-blasted through time to create a sonic experience that is at once familiar and hauntingly alien”, which probably captures the record more than anything I could possibly write. Listening to the album, it’s clear that Royal Ottawa have been playing the long game, following a unique, winding path to arrive here in the form of a nineteen-song, eighty-minute behemoth. To me, Carcosa sounds like a miracle. There are some reference points, but this is a subgenre of rock music that is fairly hard to classify because so few bands make it to this point. It reminds me a little bit of the most recent Eleventh Dream Day album, the dense psychedelia of recent The Church, and there’s also some of the later work from Paisley Underground groups like The Dream Syndicate here. 

As opening track “Slipping Away” comes in and out of focus, Royal Ottawa set up their hawk’s nest they’ll come to inhabit for the rest of the record. A lot of double albums are the product of young, eager bands darting from one style or idea to the next, unable to sit still–Carcosa is not that. It’s musical channeling–Royal Ottawa let the music come to, and through, them. This isn’t to say that the album isn’t varied, or that it doesn’t rock in places–plenty of songs, like “Try” and “Three Seven Zero”, are impressive electric guitar workouts, while tracks like “Rideau Street” and “Ontario Baby” have sharp hooks that are all the more impactful having emerged from the rest of the record’s dust storm. This side of Royal Ottawa stubbornly rears its head all the way to the end of Carcosa–some of the record’s final tracks, from “AK-49” to “Soul on Ice” to “Ground”, are some of its hardest-hitting. At some point, eighty minutes starts to feel like effectively nothing–Carcosa continues to resonate long after it draws to a close. (Bandcamp link) (Vinyl link)

Lonesome Joan – On North Pond

Release date: October 23rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Hermitage

Lonesome Joan is Amanda Lozada, a Boston-based singer-songwriter who’s been steadily releasing music under the name for nearly a decade now. Judging from their Bandcamp, On North Pond might be their first full-length album of original material, but whether or not it qualifies as a “debut album”, it’s a quietly impressive collection of folk rock with a depth that reveals itself to me more and more on repeat listens. It’s explicitly a concept album about the North Pond Hermit, a recluse who lived in the titular area of Maine with virtually no direct human contact for 27 years until 2013. Lozada clearly found a wellspring of inspiration in this figure; they wrote the entire album over “one weekend in 2019”, although it took them until earlier this year to finish recording these songs. For a mostly self-recorded folk album (aside from the spoken word soundbites in the opening track and some drum contributions from Matt Vuchichevich, it’s all Lozada), On North Pond is pleasingly dynamic–quiet and intimate, yes, but also rousing and rocking in more places than one would expect.

As opening track “Completely Free” gets at, there aren’t any easy answers to the story of the North Pond Hermit (Why did he abandon society? Why did he stay away for so long?); this grayness can either be a disappointment for those hoping to find some sort of larger universal truths in this remarkable story, or the inexplicability of the whole thing can, perhaps, be the whole draw in the first place. Likewise, On North Pond resists an easy readthrough–the degree to which Lozada is intentionally inhabiting the life of a different person compared to just how much they see themself in this figure varies based on where you’re at in On North Pond. The first track Lozada sings on the album, “Hermitage”, reaches its climax with them declaring “I’ll give my dead name up / To a dead world,” and it’s hard not to read autobiographically into that, but the duo of “Lord of the Woods” and “Lady of the Woods” both emphasize questions over observations, which I don’t believe is an accident. Several of these songs let a line or two linger in the air; one of these is “Fink”, in which Lozada sings “I’m tempted to say, ‘nothing personal’ / But these kinds of things are always personal”. In the midst of On North Pond’s blurriness, that might be the clearest picture we get. (Bandcamp link)

Cosmo Jimmy – Under That Dress

Release date: November 10th
Record label: Feel It
Genre: Power pop, pop rock, new wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Punch

Earlier this year I wrote about The Toms’ 1979 self-titled home-recorded debut, a power pop classic that’s perhaps one of the most beloved records to ever grace the pages of Pressing Concerns. The occasion of the review was a deluxe double vinyl reissue of the record via Feel It Records, a partnership that (as I said at the time) makes a lot of sense. The Toms was written, played, and recorded entirely by one man, New Jersey’s Tom Marolda, who, it should be noted, went on to create a lot more music after that debut, of varying stages of renown and availability in 2023. One of these records was Under That Dress, the sole album from the project Cosmo Jimmy, which was recorded at Marolda’s Songgram Studios in 1987 and scheduled to be released on Scorpio Records. For whatever reason, however, it was shelved until Feel It got their hands on it, releasing it for the first time ever nearly forty years later. What they’ve unearthed is a remarkable album, one that shows Marolda still at his power pop iconoclast best but not unaware of what was happening (80s pop, new wave, college rock) around him.

Under That Dress is perhaps a record with more extremes than The Toms. Opening track “Punch” is definitely one of the more “power pop anthem”-y songs here, and it packs a…well, a punch in a wide-screen 80s rock kind of way, too. It’s definitely still Tom Marolda, but it’s also not entirely removed from the world of slick “alternative” radio bands like The Smithereens, Hoodoo Gurus, and even the U.S.-commercial era of XTC. “Call of the Wild” also mines this territory gleefully in the record’s second half, and even as “Water on the Brain” is slightly harder to timestamp, it belongs in this category, too. Elsewhere on the album, though, Cosmo Jimmy look under different stones–the title track, for instance, is the group’s take on swaggering 70s rock and roll, and “Window” just as eagerly explores the world of synthpop. The B-side of Under That Dress bounces around between these points, locking into Marolda’s power pop world but still adding touches of these other elements to these songs. Cosmo Jimmy closes the record with “The Trend”, featuring a chorus that wraps up Under That Dress better than I could: “No matter what the trend might be, I’m still me”. (Bandcamp link)

Still Submarine – Warmer Shades of You

Release date: September 30th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Dream pop, indie pop, shoegaze, jangle pop, twee, noise pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Photos I Never Took

Still Submarine are an “indie pop/tweegaze” duo from New York, comprised of two people known only to us as Marcus (guitar and vocals) and Xuan (bass and vocals), who co-wrote the five songs on their debut release, the Warmer Shades of You EP. The band recruited drummer Steven Holmes and keyboardist/synth player August Smith to contribute a few extra layers to their first record, which is an intriguing collection of classically C86/melancholy jangle pop songs with a dreamy and distorted delivery. I would imagine that Marcus and Xuan have spent a lot of time with Sarah and Slumberland Records’ discographies (much like one of their closest-sounding contemporaries, New Jersey’s Lightheaded, who recently graduated from “being inspired by Slumberland bands” to “releasing music on Slumberland”). Still Submarine balance their pop side with Sweet Trip/Lovesliescrushing-ish shoegaze-y textures, although the duo don’t really let the latter side overwhelm the EP until its big finish.

The bouncy indie pop of “Photos I Never Took” kicks off the recorded era of Still Submarine with a friendly beginning, featuring a brisk drumbeat and cheerful guitar chords that are balanced by melodic but slightly downcast lead vocals. “Still Alice” is the song on Warmer Shades of You that comes closest to rivaling the pure pop charm of the opening track, with its jaunty instrumental dragging along the similarly understated but more-than-enough vocals. The sleepy ballad of “Yi’s Song” is as clear-sounding as the aforementioned two songs, although Marcus and Xuan choose to take the track in a more casual, lazily sprawling direction instead of tightly-constructed pop rock. Of course, those more interested in shoegaze-y distorted pop will gravitate towards the EP’s other two songs–the smoothly flowing noise pop of “Just Kidding” and closing track “More Glass”, which steadily takes a fuzzy indie rock foundation and layers some more instruments on top of it for a hazy but sturdy finale. Still Submarine let the noise take over, but not until after they’ve gotten their pop hits through. (Bandcamp link)

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